It might be a good time to introduce you to Ahmed M. Ahmed, a graduate of Rochester John Marshall High School, currently a senior at Cornell University, who was last week chosen as one of 32 U.S. Rhodes scholars. Ahmed will receive a scholarship, worth up to $250,000, to attend graduate school at Oxford University in England next year.

"This is not who we are as a city," Mayor Betsy Hodges says about a gunfight in downtown Minneapolis early Monday morning. Well, it's not who we are 24/7, but it's part of who we are some days, usually around 2 a.m., when the bars close and people who don't like each other meet for some gunplay.

Mike Heath reported that the dog, Baby, was stolen in May. Heath posted fliers all over south Minneapolis, where the dog was believed to have been taken, and showed up at the Star Tribune looking for assistance.

Such a referendum is direct democracy in action, in which sub groups of society push to change an inept or crooked status quo by end-running it. Or, it's tyranny of the masses, depending on your view of representative democracy and how well it works.

Long before it became personal, Athena Adkins wondered whether there was anything she could do about gun violence. The light bulb went off when she heard about schools conducting drills to teach students how to hide from armed intruders. It had come to this: Our public institutions were coaching kids on how to survive the most likely dangers in their world — tornadoes and gunfire.

It's been a grueling 15 months for Pat Mackin since that early December morning when a drunken driver slammed into Mackin's car, nearly killing him. He was on the way home from the Minnesota Music Café, where he had a gig as a saxophone player.